A blend of advocacy and (so to speak) sober reportage on an issue that’s only superficially whimsical.
An enlightening survey of 21st-century cannabis consumers, at an estimated 200 million strong.
British Columbia–based journalist Preston explains that although he was a “moderate toker” by local standards, his Rolling Stone editor perceived him as a “stoner dude,” and assigned him a story on the Canadian marijuana scene, which led to this study: “Pot lovers, psychologically landlocked by the War on Drugs, need to be reminded there’s a big ol’ world out there where the DEA doesn’t hold sway.” Preston modulates his pothead’s holiday with an alluring multinational slant—he narrates a journey through 12 countries (including Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Laos, Thailand, and the US), bookended by a local growers’ competition in Canada, and the infamous High Times “Cannabis Cup” in Amsterdam. Although Preston consumes much marijuana, hashish, kif, and sundry teas and baked goods during his travels, his observations stay thankfully sharp and lucid. Generally speaking, Preston discerns a subtle international watershed: while law enforcement in poorer countries like Nepal and Morocco ignore native cannabis consumers and tolerate (or exploit) the cash influx of so-called “drug tourists,” European nations (save France, Germany, and Sweden) are attempting to permit discreet particular cannabis possession without welcoming those same drug tourists. His jaunts through specific countries are always engaging, revealing the semi-organized underground communities necessitated by the herb’s illegal status. Back home in Vancouver, for example, a network of growers and seed/equipment suppliers pursue strains like “Bubbleberry” and “Pearly Girl” with gourmet zeal. In England, Preston follows the nascent “hempster” movement’s engagement with governmental agencies, a traditional gambit of European social activists. Elsewhere, localized irony abounds: in Muslim communities, liquor consumption is scorned over communal hash-smoking, while Holland’s tolerance of soft drugs incongruously results from that nation’s stolid conservatism. Beyond the endearing stoned camaraderie of Preston’s travelogue, he condemns pot prohibition with sound reasoning (e.g., that it encourages a criminalized black market) in case any social conservatives are reading, while his fellow travelers will enjoy knowing, for instance, how not to get hustled in Tangier. But the author also confirms there’s no alternative to getting hustled in America, courtesy of the taxpayer-financed, cannabis-focused atrocity of the drug war.
A blend of advocacy and (so to speak) sober reportage on an issue that’s only superficially whimsical.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-3897-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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